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Monday, 16 December 2013

The Dreyfus Affair For Our Times: Robert Harris's An Officer and a Spy

This review originally appeared in Critics at Large on December 14. I include it in these blogs because, although the Dreyfus Affair is not included in the final product of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War (Encompass Editions, 2012), I originally conceived of comparing the anti-Semitism in France with the homophobia during the Wilde trials in England. Instead I have previously published two blogs on The Affair. The following review is my third.

“The most frightful judicial error that has ever been made.”

—Alfred Dreyfus

Robert Harris is both prolific and versatile. A former journalist, best known for his 1986 account of the hoax surrounding Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries turned to penning novels that generally fall within three categories: alternative history such as t is contemplating a détente with America, andArchipelago (1998) that plays with the conceit that a diary purporting to be that of Stalin chronicles his
relationship with a young woman who shortly before his death provided
him with a son, one that is alive and in the 1990s is being groomed to seize power; thrillers such as The Ghost (2007) that takes as its premise the story of a professional ghost writer
who is hired to replace a predecessor who drowned under mysterious
circumstances, and then is assigned the task of completing the memoirs
of a recently resigned Prime Minister that will counter the suspicions
of war crimes he committed during the Iraq war, and Fear Index(2012) inspired by the global financial meltdown and with a nod to the Gothic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, about a hedge fund
operator who has designed computer software which uses artificial
intelligence to trade on fear that for a time makes huge profits for its
investors until the computer begins to operate on its own independent
of human control; historical novels on ancient Rome, Pompeii (2003) and the first two novels of the trilogy that focuses on the orator and politician, Cicero, Imperium (2006) and Lustrum(2009). His most recent offering, An Officer and a Spy (Random House,
2013), about the notorious injustice visited upon Alfred Dreyfus, a
French officer in fin de siècle France, fits within the last genre.

When a torn-up bordereau or memorandum that a cleaning woman had retrieved from the wastebasket of the German military attaché indicated that someone was offering to sell
low-level secrets to the Germans, suspicion fell upon Alfred Dreyfus
because his handwriting supposedly matched that written on the bordereau. Yet he
wasn’t short of money and wasn’t entangled with women, two of the most
frequent motives for espionage. Regardless, an arrogant military caste
needed a scapegoat and Dreyfus was convenient. He was an Alsatian,
therefore had German sympathies, was standoffish and generally disliked
by the officer
class and, perhaps of greater import, he was Jewish. (I say perhaps because there is an emerging historical consensus that Dreyfus's Jewishness became a major issue only after he was convicted and the anti-Semitic press seized upon his Jewish descent). He was subjected to
a bewildering interrogation, placed under arrest, and in the secret
star-chamber trial that followed he was never permitted to know the
actual charges against him. After being convicted of espionage, he
endured the public humiliation of being stripped of his military insignia
to the taunts of “Death to the Jews” from the braying mob and was
shipped out for a life of solitary confinement on Devils Island. That
fate was averted only because of the tenacious efforts of a small group
of individuals who became convinced that he had been a victim of an
egregious miscarriage of justice. Most people who know something about
what became known as The Affair likely learned about it because of the
courageous efforts of Emile Zola and his sensational expose, J’accuse,
his famous open letter to the President of the Republic in which he
named members of the military for their involvement in railroading
Dreyfus or their part in the subsequent cover up. They may have seen
Paul Muni as Zola in the overrated 1937 film The Life of Emile Zola

.

Alfred Dreyfus

In his provocative, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler,
(Harvard University Press, 2013), Ben Urwand argues that Hollywood
studios, in an effort to protect the German market for their movies, not
only acquiesced to Nazi censorship but also actively cooperated with that regime’s global propaganda effort.
During the 1930s, Georg Gyssling, Hitler’s consul in Los Angeles, was
invited to preview films before they were released. If Gyssling objected
to any part of a movie—and he frequently did—the offending scenes were
cut. As a result, according to Urwand, the Nazis had total veto power
over the content of Hollywood movies. Among the cuts requested by
Gyssling was that the word “Jew” not be spoken in The Life of Emile Zola.
Jack Warner acceded to that request. Only in a scene that a member of
the General Staff fingers Dreyfus from a list of names can the viewer
spot the word "Jew" listed for the officer’s religion. Urwand remarks
that “this one second shot turned out to be one of the few explicit
references to a Jew in American cinema for the remainder of the 1930s.”
In the film, Zola does not allude to the anti-Semitism that poisoned
France at the time. It is merely about a wrongly-convicted man without
any personal or cultural context. Anyone watching would have no idea
that the crowds hostile to Dreyfus were anti-Semitic.

Robert Harris explores the Dreyfus Affair through Colonel Georges
Picquart, a high-flying young officer, who acted as observer for the
Minister of War, General Mercier, during the court martial of Dreyfus,
before his appointment as the head of the French secret service,
euphemistically named Statistical Section. Picquart may be known to
those who saw Ken Russell’s coherently directed 1991 television film, Prisoner with Honor,
which starred Richard Dreyfuss as Picquart. Harris adds substantially
to our understanding of the principled and intelligent officer in An Officer and a Spy.
It is extensively researched by the author who draws upon generations
of secondary sources, notably the 2010 acclaimed monograph, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century,
by Oxford historian Ruth Harris (no relation) and from primary sources
that include Dreyfus’s letters and memoir, court transcripts, newspaper
reports and the French government’s recent decision to make available
online all the secret files relating to the case. He provides a
three-dimensional portrait of a widely-literate Picquart—he read
Tolstoy in Russian while in prison—took delight in the visual arts
and in music, as well as detailing the machinations of the military
cabal that perpetrated and then covered up this injustice. We come to
know Dreyfus mostly through his correspondence to his wife when it is
intercepted and read by Picquart who incorporates the purloined private
missives into his secret journal that comprises the whole book—a
brilliant fictional vehicle—that is written in the first person
present tense. As narrator, Picquart sets the scene, explaining the
complexities of the original case against Dreyfus and the rising
feelings of anti-Semitism in France.

Convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt at the beginning, in part because he
believed in the righteousness of the army that he had served all his
adult life and in
part because he shared the casual anti-Semitic prejudices of his
culture, Picquart slowly starts to realise that the defrocked captain is
innocent. When in a position to examine the evidence he finds that it
is thin and ambiguous. His disquiet increases when he finds that another
man, Major Esterhazy, has been passing low level intelligence to Germany and that his handwriting is identical to that in the original bordereau.
He reports his discovery to his superiors. They tell him to bury it. If
Esterhazy is guilty, then Dreyfus is innocent, and to admit a
miscarriage of justice in the case of Dreyfus will do irreparable harm
to the army in critical times. Picquart protests against this sacrifice
of an innocent man, and as an honest patriot is shocked by the military
hierarchy who close ranks, determined to preserve its reputation.
“Really.” he is told, “when all is said and done, what does it matter to
you if one Jew stays on Devil’s Island?” As Picquart embarks on a
Kafkaesque struggle to convince his colleagues and superiors of
Dreyfus’s innocence and Esterhazy’s guilt, the novel becomes most
absorbing and resonant to our own times: what happens to whistleblowers
who challenge powerful institutions. As Picquart sets out to discover
the truth that threatens to end his career, he soon finds himself in the
same position as the man he is trying to help, when he is framed by
forged documents and perjured testimony that proclaimed the innocence of
Esterhazy and the guilt of Dreyfus.

Colonel Georges Picquart

A career soldier Picquart gradually finds intelligence work distasteful
and longs to return to “real” soldiering. Eventually Picquart is posted
to Tunisia, where he is saved from what would have been a suicide
mission ordered from Paris by a sympathetic fellow colonel who delays
the mission and allows Picquart to secretly return to France. There he
contacts a trusted lawyer. Within a short time, although Picquart
experiences personal setbacks when he is cashiered out of the army and
spends time in prison for military insubordination, the tide is
beginning to turn. Zola’s ringing manifesto and politicians like Georges
Clemenceau begin to mount support for Dreyfus. These men, who became
known as Dreyfusards, make only cameo appearances in the novel as does
Alfred Dreyfus, but Harris vividly etches the strained relationship
between Picquart and Dreyfus. Harris gives much more attention to the
different generals, who Picquart slowly realizes are appallingly
corrupt, especially to the second in command in the shadowy intelligence
department, and subsequent successor, Major Joseph Henry.

Harris provides a not totally unsympathetic portrait of Henry who does
everything he can to undermine Picquart, even forging a letter that
allegedly confirmed Dreyfus’s guilt. Henry is so committed to the
military and will do anything to please his superiors and yet eventually
appears deeply troubled by these events even before his forgery is
exposed and he is sent to prison. There he commits suicide, a death that
unsettles Picquart even though they frequently fought, on one occasion a
duel. I think that Harris missteps when he has Picquart muse that Henry
might have been murdered to keep him quiet when no historian has
suggested this possibility. I say this because those familiar with the
Dreyfus Affair will be greatly impressed by the skill with which Harris
weaves historical facts into his fictional narrative. His complex
portrait of Henry does not need that melodramatic touch.

The story is clearly a very rich and searing one, exposing the determination of
military and political leaders to cover up their errors at all costs to preserve
the official version of events. More profoundly, it also reveals the bigotry
that foreshadowed the genocidal horror of the twentieth century. But An
Officer and a Spy also chronicles the efforts of others, some of them
anti-Semitic, that put their careers at risk and in some cases their lives to
right a terrible wrong. The novel also underscores how a secret intelligence
agency will attempt to destroy the careers and lives of anyone within that
community who believes that its actions violate the constitution and the laws of
a given country.

Consider the case of Thomas Drake who spent almost twenty years at the
National Security Agency. He was called an enemy of the state and charged with
espionage, and if convicted could have faced thirty-five year prison sentence
for talking to the press about the illegalities that occurred at the NSA even
though he did not disclose classified documents. The government case collapsed
before the trial began. He is now speaking out publicly about his ordeal and the
threat that the NSA and other secret intelligence services pose not only to the
privacy of citizens in the name of national security but also how they violate
the laws and the constitution of different countries. The ongoing revelations of
Edward Snowden, who credits Drake as his inspiration, only confirms Drake’s
message.

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That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).